ABSTRACT
What we have discussed so far could apply to almost any of the 16 Konzentrationslager. What remains is to examine the specific camps to which the Spanish prisoners were sent, ranging from Oranienburg to Mauthausen. In any comparison with the rest of the system, KL-Oranienburg was a dream; a survivor called it 'a model camp, human and gentle', 1 but strictly in reference to the others. Its most famous Spanish inmate, the former socialist prime minister Largo Caballero, survived it, but died a premature death. Buchenwald too had its Spanish inmate of renown, the future novelist and Minister of Culture Jorge Semprún. 2 Like others, Semprún was to remark on the camp's peculiar setting. The hill surrounding it, known as the Ettersberg, is situated only a few miles north of Goethe's Weimar. All but one of the trees that covered it had been cut down. The great oak they chose to spare was none other than the famous tree in whose shade Goethe used to rest in his walks with Eckermann, the spot where they would sit and talk and ponder, perchance, on the future of Germany. That same tree now stood inside KL-Buchenwald, 'forest of beeches', on the esplanade between the Effektenkammer and the kitchens. 3 Here amid Thuringia's greenery, which could be taken for the heart of Germany itself, source of the life-affirming philosophy of its greatest poetic genius, even here nature was uprooted and overturned. As the entering prisoners passed through the iron gate, with its inscription 'Jedem das seine' ('To each his own'), and saw the hills of their lost freedom stretching for miles in front of them, two monuments were there to greet them, to which every prisoner had to turn eyes left in salute. There, on a lofty plinth, stood a giant statue in stone of the German eagle, its wings outstretched. Then, on similar supports, two groups of statues that stood face to face: on the right, a priest, a monk, and a Jew in vulgar caricature, and on the left, four SS taking aim. 4 Buchenwald had other particularities. 5 A feature of its everyday life was the sound of the 'singing-horses', the four-man teams of prisoners dragging the rock-filled carts and forced to sing as they pulled. These were not the only sounds. Ettersberg became known as 'the hill which the birds forsook', for the shouts, shrieks, groans, and screams emanating from the camp forced even the birds to change their habitat. The birds did not fly at Dora either. This subsidiary of Buchenwald, set in the Harz Mountains a few miles from Nordhausen, opened in September 1943 as an underground factory for the production of Hitler's Vergeltungswaffen (V1s and V2s). Working from 12 to 14 hours a day in damp, dark tunnels, and sleeping there, the prisoners did not see the sky or breathe fresh air for months on end.
